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Friday, December 28, 2012

Better Than You: part 22

22.

It took at least ten seconds for
Mike to roll New York around in his
head and realize what that meant. He pushed himself up so he was sitting
upright across from her, frowning. “New York? Did you take the job?”

She drew her knees up to her chin
and folded her arms around them, diamond finding moonbeams to play with. Even
in the dark, he could see the guarded, aloof nature he’d thought she was
shaking off come across her face, shutting him out. “Not yet,” she said, and he
felt like he’d been punched.

“Not yet? But you’re going to? Are you -,” the bitter, acid taste of
anger came up the back of his throat and he closed his mouth before he could
say something he shouldn’t.

Delta pushed her hair back with the
hand that wore his ring and had the nerve to meet his gaze and say, “I owe it
to myself to at least consider accepting.”

“And you were gonna tell me…when?…after
we got married?”

“This was always my plan, Michael,”
her voice took on a sharp edge. “I’m too well educated to work the retail floor
the rest of my life.”

A plan she hadn’t seen fit to tell
him about before tonight. A future she hadn’t wanted to share with him and was
now dropping over him like a bucket of cold water. All the progress he thought
he’d been making with her was a sham. She could take his heart and take his
ring and then calmly tell him that she was “considering” New York.

He was endlessly patient with her,
but suddenly, he couldn’t contain the angry surge of betrayal building inside
him. He shoved the covers clear and got to his feet, snatched his boxers up off
the floor because he didn’t want to be naked and indignant at the same time.
“I’m so glad for you,” he said as he stepped into them, “for you and your plan.”

“Oh, don’t act like you don’t have
plans too,” she shot back.

“Yeah, you’re wearing my plan!”

Her bedside lamp clicked on and she
was still sitting with her knees pulled up, the glare she leveled on him
vicious. “So you’re telling me,” she said in a huff, “that if you had a chance
to transfer and make more money, you wouldn’t take it?”

“No,” he said, and while that might
have been a lie before Delta, it wasn’t one now. “I have a good job, I make
good money…I’m not some spoiled-ass well-educated brat trying to impress my
rich daddy by going to New York!”

She drew herself up against the
headboard, dark eyes flashing and furious. “That’s what you want to do here?
Call me names?”

“What I want is to marry you. And I guess I was stupid to think that could
go smoothly.”

“You’re stupid to think you
can…just…just decide that we’re
getting married and that’s it. That I don’t get any input,” she countered. Her
face was tense with fury, but her voice was wavering.

Because he was, in fact, stupid – at
least when he let his emotions get involved in something – he couldn’t tone down
his aggression and talk her through this. She wasn’t fighting him, but some sense of independence he
was threatening. The girl couldn’t relax and allow herself to be loved, to be
doted on and taken care of. Mike should have sunk down on the edge of the bed
and walked through her mental minefield with her. Should have, but wasn’t
patient enough to. His feelings were good and bruised now.

“You don’t…” his hands clenched and
unclenched at his sides, “don’t let me put a ring on you and then tell me
you’re leaving. You don’t do that,
Delta!”

“I didn’t say I was leaving,” she was almost shouting. “Are you too much of a
child for me to even talk to you
about it?”

She made a frustrated growling
sound. “God, would you just listen to me?”

“You’re not saying anything. You
want to go to New York. Yeah. Message received.”

“Shut
up!” left her lungs as a shriek. A high, shrill, haunted house shriek that
pushed Mike back a step. Delta’s eyes were wide and black, like she’d startled
herself, her expression almost panicked. “Shut up and listen to me,” she hissed through her teeth.

Taking up the reins of his temper
and pulling it in check was a herculean effort, but he managed, because fine,
just visible tremors were surging through her delicate arms and he didn’t
relish the thought of frightening a woman into agreeing with him. Especially
not this woman. “Okay,” it was all he could do to keep his tone neutral, “I’m
listening.”

Delta gave a sharp nod of
approval…but said nothing. She sat, arms wrapped tight across her shins, still
shivering, her eyes lost in the near space between them, and offered him
nothing to listen to.

Too
soon, Mike knew, as disappointment
dropped heavy as a stone in the pit of his stomach. He’d been so sure that her
softening was irreversible, that those lonely looks she cast his way and
reflexive way her hands found him in sleep had meant she was ready for this.
That she wanted this the way he did. That she’d oh my God and I can’t believe
this and flash her ring to every other female within a fifty mile radius.

Instead she lifted a hand to her
face – the hand with the ring, the diamond throwing bright spots of blue light
through the lamp’s warm panels – and put a manicured nail between her teeth,
started, ever so slowly, to rock forward and back, an unconscious swaying that
made her look more like a child than a harpy.

“Delta,” he said as gently as he
could manage, arms folding across his chest. “What do you want?”

Her eyes came to his face and darted
away.

“Not what you’re supposed to want,”
he reminded, “but what you actually want.”

He could have kicked himself for
giving her an opportunity. Me, he
willed silently. You want me. Because
he wanted her – not as a trophy, not for bragging rights, not for all the
reasons he’d ever wanted a girl.

Delta took a deep, shivery breath
and let a dark wing of her hair slide from behind her ear and across her face.
“I don’t know,” she murmured, and Mike wanted to scream.

Instead, he picked his clothes up
off the chair in the corner and dressed.

**

What
am I doing? Delta thought. What in the hell is wrong with me? Mike was doing a sloppy job
tucking in his shirt and stepping into his shoes at the same time. Delta
watched him through the curtain of her hair and knew that if she couldn’t shake
loose from this onslaught of stubborn pride and panic, he’d walk out her door
and leave them irreparably damaged. Why was she doing this? Why was she taking
shears to this beautiful, shimmering banner of love and acceptance he’d tried
to wrap around her?

Her heart was fluttering like a
little bird against her ribs and she felt her pulse throbbing in the tips of
her fingers and in her eyelids, felt the tremors stealing over her in waves. The
diamond on her hand weighed two-thousand pounds and it terrified her. With dry
throat and aching chest, she searched desperately for the cause of the terror,
not sure if a new career or Michael Walker was the thing she most hated giving
up. The awful dichotomy of frustrations that had left her speechless at the
washing machine was crushing her now. She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think
and couldn’t do anything to stop Mike from buckling his belt and preparing to
leave her.

Say
something! Her conscience screamed. Don’t let him get away!

“Mike,” she finally managed to say
as he folded back the cuffs of his shirt. Her voice was small and she hadn’t
expected him to hear, but he paused and his head lifted. “I’m not trying to be
cold,” she said just above a whisper. “I just wanted you to listen.”

His green eyes were skeptical as
they moved over her, coming to rest on her left hand. “Listen to what,
sweetheart?” he said, not unkindly. “I have no idea what’s going on in that
pretty head of yours.”

She pushed her hair back behind her
ear, sighing. “Neither do I.”

It stood to reason that every girl
decided to marry her man in that shaking, breath-held moment of
one-knee-and-ring-box. With her hands clasped over her mouth, hyperventilating,
a woman made up her mind before she said yes. But Delta hadn’t actually said
the word. And she certainly hadn’t made up her mind. She’d been body slammed
with the weight of him asking, with the knowledge that he loved her enough to
even consider forever.

Her decision came as she sat curled
back against her headboard. As Mike walked around the end of her bed and sat
down beside her feet, the mattress dipping. As he reached for her quivering
hand and brushed his big thumb across the diamond he’d bought her. His face was
heavy with resignation.

“You get that I’m not trying to hold
you back, don’t you?” he asked. His eyes came up to hers, thoroughly wounded. “I
know you’re all hard-core manager ball-buster,” he said, as inelegant as
always, “I know that. I didn’t expect you to be happy staying where you are at
work. But…” his hand fell away from hers. “This is what you want? New York?”

Unshed tears burned the backs of her
eyes. She sniffed. “I don’t want to make a purely emotional decision and end up
regretting it later.”

His half-smile was grim. “What do
you think marriage is? A business arrangement?”

“I…”

“You want Greg back?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Then, Delta, I -,”

“I don’t know how to do this,” she
blurted, the tightness behind her sternum needing some kind of release. The
knot started to loosen, the truth tasted like heaven on her tongue, and then
words starting pouring out of her. “I don’t know how you can buy me this,” she
waggled her fingers against her knee. “Or how you can get on your knee and ask
me to marry you. I don’t know,” she
swallowed hard, “how you can love me,
because I’m such a bitch and I’ve made it so hard on you.” Her eyes started to
fill and she blinked. “My dad raised me to be just like him, and I don’t know
how to do this,” she motioned between
them. “I…I am trapped, and I don’t want out. I want you to love me and I don’t
want it to be a compromise for either of us. I want a husband and I want kids
and I want not to need them. God, I
don’t make any sense…this just hurts
and…” She glanced down at her toes, the bumps of them under the sheet.

“Baby,” he said in a careful voice
that made her want to look at him, “have you ever actually been in love with
anyone?”

It was far too sensitive and perceptive
a question for him. It stung to know she was so transparent, and to think that
he would pull out her emotions and hold them up to her as a mirror, drawing
attention to something no one but her best friend Regina ever had. The answer
was a complicated one, because she thought that she might have been truly,
deeply, painfully in love with the child that had only ever been a ghost inside
her and had then been nothing at all. A life never come into full creation. She
had dreamed – still did – about her offspring, sometimes as a dark-headed
little boy, at others as a girl with blonde ringlets. A shining face and happy
soul that was all hers and no one else’s. She’d felt robbed and starved afterward,
cold and unfeeling, and nothing had caused her pain since, except for this
moment, wearing this ring, looking at this boy.

“No,” she said on a deep breath. “No,
I never have.”

“I guess,” he rubbed at the back of
his neck, eyes going to the window, “that I thought you might have been in love
with me.”

A thick coat of water glazed her
eyes and she blinked again. “I think I am,” she said quietly, and felt
something lock into place inside her, a puzzle finally taking shape, its image
so clear she wasn’t sure why she hadn’t seen it. Maybe she’d refused to see it.
“I think that’s why it hurts so much.”

His head snapped in her direction, a
cautious sort of hope shining in his eyes. “Do you want to marry me?” he asked
like he was afraid to know the answer. “I don’t mean do you want to get married
at all, or if you want a wedding, or if you already have a dress picked out –
do you want me?”

And he didn’t just mean for now, or
until it stopped working. Mike was an all or nothing kind of guy. He wanted
cohabitation and two toothbrushes on the counter and anniversary dinners and belonging
to each other. Marriage wasn’t all the things everyone said it was – it was a
raw fusing of two lives into one and all the tension that came with it.

Delta watched the lamplight pick
golden threads in his blonde hair and she didn’t want to be frightened. She
didn’t want to be burdened with her cold heart. She didn’t want to uproot her
life for New York and the promise of what-could-be if it meant losing what was
in front of her right now.

“There’s jobs in Atlanta,” she said,
and watched his whole body light up, coming to sudden, happy attention. Mike
wasn’t – as his green eyes went wide and a white, crooked smile stole across
his face – so very different from the thing that had been taken from her years
before. Maybe that was why she loved him. Maybe that was wrong of her. But
maybe all that mattered was, even if it scraped and clawed and killed her, she
knew she had the capacity to love someone. Maybe that was worth whatever
heartache she had to endure.

“I want to marry you,” she said, and
he leaned forward, caught her face in one big hand, and kissed her.

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